Elvis, Change Your Name (A Story Outline) Poem by Nancy Ames

Jack Lawson, an alienated teenager, a loner who has grown up in an urban slum combatting school-yard bullies, slips in and out of vivid fantasies about the dead rock stars, particularly Elvis Presley.

Jack pretends that they have been actually living under the witness protection program all this time, but have recently escaped from surveillance and gathered together in a ghost town in the western desert. Reality and fantasy alternate rapidly in this story and the fantasy feels stronger throughout, steadily increasing its influence on the rather drab and depressing realities of the boy's life.

The title refers to Elvis Presley's courageous refusal to change his name when the promoters of the day urged him to do so early in his career, alluding as well to the irony of such a person having to assume a false identity, which is something that Elvis does reject in the fantasy when he moves into a knight-errant role along with the other 'dead rock stars'.

One of humanity's favourite survival mechanisms is always whispering to us, especially to the young, that we can take tremendous risks and still get away with it. That's why so many people want so much to believe that our dead heroes have magically escaped somehow. The life-force knows that, in the long run, it will be the risk-takers who survive, not the ones who always carefully do the safe thing. Of course, the danger and death are shockingly real to the participants. And yet something still whispers, 'But they got away..'

Another important aspect of the story is speculation about what would happen if the 'dead rock stars', those truly outstanding individuals, were compelled by circumstance to give up their musical outlets and turn their tremendous personal power and genius into other pathways.

This story is also about the psychological necessity of a frontier, a place where the misfits of society - the very good and the very bad - can live out a meaningful drama and work on vital human issues at a safe distance from today's urban business districts and suburban breeding-grounds. Jack's fantasy is not altogether impossible, after all, and the musical culture created by the rock stars has continued to be relevant to succeeding 'lost generations'.

In real time, Jack is tiring of the constant skirmishing with the local bullies and he is suffering from hunger and exposure because he is reluctant to go home where he is on bad terms with his father, who is harsh and abusive, and where his mother is always pre-occupied and exhausted by the needs of several younger children. He goes to rescue a small child who is being hassled by some bigger boys, and he becomes extremely violent.

In the on-going fantasy, Elvis, Hendrix, and Ronnie Van Zandt are tracking a bad guy who has kidnapped a young girl and taken her to an old cabin in the mountains. The rock stars are much older and tougher now; they rescue the girl and Elvis has a shoot-out with the kidnapper which he easily wins.

Then they return, with the girl, to the ghost town and their friends. They have found evidence at the old cabin that the girl would have been sold to slave-traders. Elvis has therefore grimly decided to mobilize the 'dead rock stars' against this sort of crime. The half-dead girl is taken to Janis Joplin's hotel to recuperate.

Again in real time, Jack finally goes home for supper, but both his parents now seem hostile and, when he goes back out into the cold night-time streets he is killed in a drive-by shooting.

He wakes up in the hotel in the ghost town, next to the rescued girl of his fantasy, who is called Little Suzy. She is asleep. Jack looks out onto the Main Street of the town and sees Elvis, who is riding a white horse and speaking to a crowd of townspeople.

Soon the posse rides out and we see Jack following them on horseback, calling out, 'Hey, Elvis! Wait for me! '